Stranger Things – Chapter Four: The Body

By starrymag | August 11, 2016

By: Kathryn Trammell

 

In “Chapter Three” of Stranger Things Joyce was finally able to communicate with her son, Will, via blinking Christmas lights and an alphabet painted on her living room wall. This is perhaps why, at the end of the episode, when Hopper’s officers pull Will’s lifeless body from a quarry, we could all assume that the news of Will’s death would be a hard pill for Joyce to swallow. Luckily, the name of Chapter Four is “The Body” so there’s no mistaking what mystery will be solved by the end of this episode.

 

Joyce

 

“Chapter Four” opens at Joyce’s (Winona Ryder) house. Hopper (David Harbour) has come to deliver the news that Will’s body has been found, but Joyce takes the opportunity to show him the wall from where the Hawkin’s monster nearly pulled himself free just before Will/Lights told her that he was alive, that he was “right here,” and that she needed to “run.” She also tells Hopper that the monster inside the wall looked like a man without a face, which leads both Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Hopper to imply she’s going crazy from grief. She refuses to listen to them both. She knows Will is alive and after Hopper leaves she goes to the shed, grabs her axe and sits on the couch facing the monster’s wall ensuring it doesn’t take her other son away from her while he cries himself to sleep in his bedroom.

 

The next day Joyce goes with Jonathan to the morgue to identify Will’s body. Jonathan runs out of the viewing room nearly retching all over the floor, but Joyce stands defiantly on the other side of the window asking the coroner to show her one of Will’s birthmarks. She comes seething out of the autopsy room shouting at Hopper and Jonathan that the “thing” in the autopsy room “is not my son.” Jonathan chases her down the street after she leaves the station and tells her that she can’t shut down on him right now – that he needs her help with Will’s funeral arrangements – but Joyce rolls her eyes and walks away from him prompting Jonathan to swear that he won’t let Will’s body stay in a freezer for one more day.

 

Back at home, Joyce blasts the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” into her living room. It’s both a plea for Will to talk to her and a dare for the monster to show himself again. Suddenly, something begins thumping from inside the wall where the monster crawled last night prompting Joyce to turn off the stereo. That’s when she hears Will’s soft voice crying “Mom” and the tapping grow more frantic as if Will’s trying to get her attention and show her where he is. It works and Joyce is able to locate the exact spot of the tapping before tearing at the wallpaper as if it might reveal her son hiding underneath. What it reveals instead is pink, veiny, organic tissue that seems to move and look like exposed muscle. It is translucent enough to see through and after a moment of screaming Will’s name, Will (Noah Schnapp) pops up on the other side of the membranous wall revealing that he is alive, but trapped behind it. He isn’t alone though and her sobs at finding him are cut short by the low growl of the Hawkins’ monster emanating from somewhere behind him. Will says to her, “It’s coming,” and Joyce begs Will to tell her where he is and how she can get to him so that she can help him. He begins to describe the place we saw after Barb was abducted saying, “It’s like home, but it’s so dark. It’s so dark and empty. And it’s cold!”

 

Unable to break through the tissue that separates them, Joyce tells Will to hide from the monster fearing that the longer he stays to talk with her, the longer his life hangs in jeopardy. Hiding is the only comfort she can offer him at this time. He leaves and the wall seals itself up right before Joyce’s eyes. Angry and confused, Joyce begins to chop down the wall with her axe desperate to reach her son again, but when the light of outside shines through the other end of her wall, she realizes the portal to him is gone.

 

Jonathan and Nancy

 

Jonathan, meanwhile, does as he promised he would do and continues to organize Will’s funeral. His search for an affordable casket is interrupted when Nancy (Natalia Dyer) enters the funeral home looking for him. After being questioned by the police about Barb’s (Shannon Purser) disappearance the night she went to Steve’s house, Nancy went home and pieced together one of the photos that Steve (Joe Keery) and his gang tore apart after realizing Jonathan had taken the photos while hiding in the woods. The photo Nancy puzzled back together was of Barb sitting on the diving board moments before she disappeared with a shadowy, grainy figure looming just behind Barb’s back. Nancy gives the taped-up photo to Jonathan and tells him that when she went back to Steve’s to investigate Barb’s disappearance on her own, she thought she saw something in the woods. That “something” might be the blurry figure in Jonathan’s photos.

 

The use of the words “weird man” to describe the thing she saw in the woods sets off all the right alarms inside Jonathan’s mind and before Nancy has the chance to leave after convincing herself she’s going crazy, he stops her . . .

 

Jonathan:      What’d he look like?

Nancy:            What?

Jonathan:      This man you saw in the woods. What’d he look like?

Nancy:           I don’t know. It was almost like he . . . he didn’t have –

Jonathan:      Didn’t have a face?

Nancy:          How did you know that?

 

It was at this moment in the episode that I screamed at my TV, “Take her to your mom!” but Steve wasn’t listening to me. Instead, he takes Nancy to his school’s darkroom to enlarge the edge of the photograph that may or may not have captured the monster standing behind Barb. But when the photo develops, Nancy’s eyes grow wide. “That’s it. That’s what I saw,” she says, causing Jonathan to realize not only was his mom right about the monster, but she was also right about Will (and Barb) still being alive.

 

Hopper

 

As if the photo and Nancy’s admission weren’t enough proof that the body recovered from the quarry is nothing more than a decoy, Hopper’s investigation leads him to track down a plethora of evidence to further solidify this theory as fact. The first bit of evidence presents itself the morning Joyce and Jonathan show up at the station to ID Will’s body. While inside the morgue, Hopper talks with one of his secretaries about how Hawkins’ resident coroner was sent home last night and replaced by someone from the state. When Hopper later asks the city coroner why he was sent home, he tells Hopper that it wouldn’t have been unusual if Will had been someone like John F. Kennedy – the state has something to hide.

 

Later at the bar, Hopper strikes up a conversation with the man who found Will’s body floating in the water. He immediately proves himself a stranger to the community when he seems to not realize Hopper’s daughter is dead – something any resident of Hawkins would know. Hopper catches the man lying about if whether or not the quarry is owned at the state level and follows the man into an ally where he slaps him around until the man finally admits that he was basically hired by some organization to be a Johnny-on-the-spot: “They told me to call [the emergency] in and not let anyone get too close to [the body].”

 

This sends Hopper speeding back to the police station where he breaks into the morgue in search of Will’s body. When he finds it, the body is laying in a containment drawer that Hopper pulls into the light. He takes a pocket knife from his pants and flips it open. He inhales, presses the blade to Will’s chest and cuts – the cotton fluff spewing from his chest. This reveals the body as nothing more that an elaborate hoax and a very well-made doll.

 

Eleven, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas

 

Still upset that Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) lied to him about Will being found alive, Mike (Finn Wolfhard) sits on his basement couch sulking while Eleven plays with his walkie talkie. He asks her to stop, but she ignores him, showing him yet another one of the powers she learned at the Lab (we see her learning this in a flashback) the moment she transforms the walkie talkie and herself into a conduit for Will’s voice.

 

Mike rushes over to Eleven’s side and watches the walkie talkie as Will’s sad, tiny voice sings the lyrics to “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” He asks her if it’s Will and she nods, blood oozing from her nose and any ill-will between them dissipating. When the connection fades, he radios in to both Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) telling them that they all need meet in his basement.

 

After Eleven fails to recreate a connection with Will’s voice once the others arrive, they all theorize that she may need a stronger conductor if they ever want to hear Will again. So, they devise a plan to sneak into their school’s Audio/Visual Lab giving Eleven access their Science Teacher’s Ham radio. This plan also involves giving Eleven a makeover that they hope will allow her pass as Mike’s blonde second cousin who has just flown in from Sweden or at least that’s the story they spin with when their teacher finds them trying to break into the Audio/Visual Room. He tells them he will give them access to the radio, but they have to attend a school assembly for Will’s death first.

 

At the assembly, all four kids watch from the stands as a grief counselor offers her services to the entire student body. Beside them, the boys who bullied Mike, Lucas and Dustin in “Chapter One” laugh and mock Will’s death suggesting no one cares about him because he wasn’t important enough to care about. Mike watches them and soon Eleven is watching them too parroting the insult she heard Mike use earlier to describe them: “Mouth-breathers.”

 

As the assembly disperses, Mike walks up behind the two bullies and confronts them saying they shouldn’t have shown such disrespect for his friend. Troy, the worse of the two blockheads, slings a series of homophobic epithets about Will at his friends that causes Mike to shove him to the ground once his back is turned on him. Enraged at having been knocked down by a “freak” like Mike, Troy (Peyton Wich) stands up and charges at Mike, but he is frozen one lumbering step from colliding into him. Out of frame and standing a few paces behind Mike is Eleven, who is staring at Troy the way she stared at the screeching fan in “Chapter One.” We aren’t sure if it’s from fear or if it’s from some power to telekinetically affect bodily organs, but Eleven causes Troy to urinate on himself, the children standing around them erupting into laughter at Troy’s expense.

 

Mike turns to look at the others with a smile on his face and it’s then that he notices Eleven’s concentration on Troy. With the bully properly shamed and her friend protected from any more insults, she breaks the concentration to look at Mike with a hint of blood dripping just above her lip. She never once seems apologetic for her actions, never once bows her head and bats her lashes as if waking from some uncontrollable Jekyll and Hyde lapse in judgment. Instead, Eleven smirks back at Mike revealing to us that Millie Brown has more swagger when wiping blood from her nose than most of us are lucky enough to have in entire lives.

 

As promised, the kids gain access to the Audio/Visual Lab and to the Ham radio inside. It takes Eleven seconds to find Will, and when she does, we hear the same tapping coming through the radio that Joyce heard on her wall. This is because Eleven has found Will at the exact same moment his mom has found him and they all sit and listen as Joyce and Will talk to each other about the dark, cold, empty world he’s being forced to live in. As soon as the monster arrives, the radio short circuits shooting sparks into the air. With the connection to Will lost, Eleven slumps back into her chair depleted of all energy, her veins looking as if they might rupture under her skin. They carry her out of the lab and back home to Mike’s basement after putting out the fire that ignited when the connection to Will was lost.